Samhain Publishing, $4.50, ISBN 978-1-61922-495-7
Fantasy Romance, 2015
Poor Zoey Blake. Homeless and hungry, the poor darling just have to meet a mugger one cold evening, and with Christmas just around the corner too. Oops, she gets stabbed. Fortunately, vampire Ian Kennedy happens to be around to give her the vampire bite and gives her enough of his blood to heal her wound. His vampire bro Connor O’Shea is at first not too keen on Ian saving another stray, as Connor himself has once loved and lost, and he doesn’t want another woman to face the risks that eventually claimed his soulmate. But soon these three would decide to play house together, so woo-hoo!
Here’s the thing about The Bite of Winter. The author sets the vampires up as emo brooding types. Connor seeks to drown his melancholy by shagging willing women and feeding on them; Ian prefers to be more on the goody-goody side. Zoey is, of course, needy and desperate and badly wounded, so I suppose it’s a good thing that she likes the two guys that take her in, or else this story would take a turn for the more creepy. But after the superficial character build-up is done with, these three soon end up in bed together and then it’s the happy ending. What happened? Where are the plot build-up, the romantic tension, et cetera? How did the happy ending come about again? How do these people know that they are destined together, via peen-hoochie telepathy?
And the sex scenes aren’t even that hot or adventurous or long enough to make up for the abrupt whiplash-like switch from emo to three-is-best oh-oh-oh.
So I guess this one does bite, but not in a good way.
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